"From the outset, certain parallels were striking.
For it concerned a certain child born
in a certain very primitive, Paleolithic village somewhere.
Just where, he did not know.
This was undoubtedly a part of the narratives protasis
or exposition, which he had missed
by finding himself forced to fly standby and entering en,
as it were, medias res.
On the United leg.
The sense he got was of a certain extraordinarily
primitive, Third World jungle or rainforest region of the world,
perhaps Asia or South America, and so terrifically
long ago as to be literally Paleolithic or perhaps
Mesolithic, as, of course, the anthropological origins
of genres like this nearly always are.
The context in which my own friend then subsequently
had it related to him by his acquaintance
was, if possible, he said, even more banal and unexpected
than a commercial airline flight, as if somehow
the quotidian and, as it were, modern everydayness
of the narrative circumstances made its archetypal parallels
even more remarkable.
But he also emphasized extremely primitive and Paleolithic,
as in spears and crude lean-tos, and pantheistic shamanism,
and an extremely primitive hunting and gathering mode
of subsistence.
And in a certain isolated village
deep in the region's rainforest, apparently
a certain child is born who emerges
as one of these extraordinarily high-powered, supernaturally
advanced human specimens who come along in every culture
every once in a great while, as history shows.
Although he said the younger airline passenger,
whom he surmised might have been a corporate or academic
scientist, did not use the word 'supernatural' or 'messianic'
or any of the other terms the cycle usually reserves
for specimens like this--" It's just that I'm [INAUDIBLE]
"--instead using terms such as 'advanced,' 'brilliant' or
'ingenious' and describing the child's exceptional qualities
and career almost exclusively in terms of cognitive ability,
raw IQ.
Because he said, apparently, at a very young age,
an age at which most of the village's children
were just beginning to learn the very basic customs
and behaviors that the primitive village expected
of its citizens, this two or perhaps three-year-old child
was already evincing and ability to answer absolutely
any question put to it.
To answer correctly, accurately, comprehensively.
Even very difficult or even paradoxical questions.
Of course, the full range and depth
of the child's interrogatory intelligence
were not manifested for some time,
thus their emergence serves as the archetypal Threshold
Experience, and occupies much of the protasis.
That at first, the ability seems simply a novelty, something
for its parents to, so to speak, dine out on,
and amuse the other villagers with.
Something on the order of, 'Look, our two-year-old knows
how many twigs you have if you hold 5 twigs,
and then pick up 3 more twigs.'
Until of course, one of the parents' amused neighbors
happens to say or ask something that prompts the child
to disclose that it also knows everything culturally
important about each individual twig the fellow happens
to be holding.
Such as, for example, the village's
official and idiomatic names for the trees the twigs derived
from, and the various pantheistic deities
and religious significance of each species of relevant tree.
As well as which ones have edible leaves or bark
that eased fever if boiled and so on,
including which species' grain and tensile
flexion were especially good for spear shafts,
and the small cytotoxic darts the villages of this region
used with crude reed blowguns to defend themselves
against the tropical rain forest's predacious
jaguars, which are apparently the scourge
of the Paleolithic third world, and the leading
statistical cause of death after disease
and inter-tribal warfare.
After which, of course, in short order,
after reports of the remarkable twig prelection get about,
the parents and other primitive villagers
begin regarding the child's intelligence in a wholly
different sphere, it emerges that the child is also
capable of answering all manner of both trivial and profoundly
non-trivial questions."